Infosec from @rattis' point of view

Monthly Archives: November 2014

So I’ve been dropping hints about this since July or so. The biggest hint was on my “Raspberry Pi Projects” entry from September. Since then I have been told by the editor of The Linux Journal that the article is going to be published. It will be in either the December, or January issue. I hoping January, because that’s the annual security issue.

Short version, 6 Raspberry Pis, 6 wireless cards, a laptop, 1 switch. About 4% the cost of a large network vendor’s commercial version.

I’ll be submitting this talk for the 2015 Conferences I go to. (Planning on Circle City Con, DerbyCon, and GrrCon).

This year a 17 year old woman, Malala Yousafzai, won the Nobel Peace Prize. Actually she had to share it with someone else, but that’s besides the point. She got it for her fight to get women in Pakistan education.

But around that same time, there was an article on NPR called “The Crime That Has Shocked Pakistan“. The story was about a philanthropist in Karachi, Abdul Sattar Edhi, being robbed. He created a private ambulance service, and some of the residents in Karachi trust his foundation with their money instead of the banks.

But the thing that stuck me, was his being robbed was a large enough story in Pakistan, that NPR covered it. From the sound of the article he sounded like he was bigger news than Malala Yousafzai winning half the peace prize. But the NPR article did touch on her briefly. “Pakistanis tend to portray the teenager as a puppet of the West“. (emphasis mine).

That kind of shocked, as at the time, even on NPR made it a big deal. Then I remembered from my time as an Anthropology student. It is all culturally relevant. To us, it’s a big deal, because she’s bringing our (the west’s) form of equality. To her media, she’s pushing the West’s agenda for the future, while he brings them medical services now.

Yes that seems like a generalization, but it is partly based on my own experiences. We seem to be great at talking to each other about what the message is, but if we’re talking to another “non-info security” professional, we can’t explain things in ways that work.

Thinking about the devices that are supposed to make it possible for Tor user friendly for mass market consumers. These are boxes like the Onion Pi, Anonabox, TorFI, Cloak, etc. I think the designers are missing a few things.